Everyone knows I love a floater, so when M. Scott Brauer commented on the Chinese photography post and said he wished I’d included Li Wei, I grabbed the folder of Wei’s work that’s been burning a hole on my desktop and uploaded it with glee.
Wei is a photographer and performance artist who puts himself in gravity-defying poses, often with the use of harnesses. Thirty-seven-year-old Wei intentionally seeks to surprise and shock the viewer
Check it out here.
Photographer Carolyn Drake and writer Ilan Greenberg have won the 2008 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize.
They will receive $20,000 in support of their project “Becoming Chinese: Uighurs in Cultural Transition,” which will study the Muslim ethnic group in China facing pressures to assimilate with China’s Han culture. About 10 million Uighurs live in China.
Check it out here.
Wacky Packages—a series of collectible stickers featuring parodies of consumer products and well-known brands and packaging—were first produced by the Topps company in 1967, then revived in 1973 for a highly successful run. In fact, for the first two years they were published, Wacky Packages were the only Topps product to achieve higher sales than their flagship line of baseball cards. The series has been relaunched several times over the years, most recently to great success in 2007.
Known affectionately among collectors as “Wacky Packs,” with artist Art Spiegelman, as a key creative force, the stickers were illustrated by such notable comics artists as Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Norm Saunders.
Check it out here. Via BoingBoing.
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”
McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness,” says the White House operated in “permanent campaign” mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president’s inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.
Check it out here.
Current TV brings us this short and interesting documentary about the confusion over the right to photograph in public places in the U.K.:
Check it out here.
On trial for the 1989 murder of one African-American, a skinhead was accused yesterday of stalking another black person he allegedly wanted to kill in the Brandywine Creek area near Wilmington.
The murder was averted when he realized his target was white, an ex-girlfriend testified yesterday.During cross-examination, the 39-year-old Newark, Del., woman revealed defendant Thomas Gibison’s alleged attempt to murder again so that he could earn from fellow skinheads a blood-red teardrop in his spider tattoo, which was a trophy from the first murder.
Check it out here.
The next coolest photography event of the year will be in Southern California this Fall as the Sports Shooter Academy Boot Camp returns September 5 & 6, 2008.
The Boot Camp is a two-day hands-on, shooting education program with a different emphasis each day. Participants can register for single day or attend both days.
Check it out here.
Last week my buddy Eric gave me a heads up about this photographer Alex Prager, so I checked out her site, and was totally stunned. ALex works in Los Angeles, shooting photos that are extremely retro in their styling, but modern in their execution. Imagine the set of The Birds, or an episode of The Wonder Years, but shot in this weird, almost Stepford Wives kind of way. It’s kind of like she crafted a bunch of personas from different pieces of characters in films and then photographed it. The colors are bright, but somewhat desaturated and definitely surreal.
Check it out here.
Are you ready for some nostalgic “ha-ha’s” at my expense? Embarrassing ones? Good. Way back in 1980/81, my 9th grade friend Curtis and I made a Xeroxed cut-and-paste “New Wave” magazine called Propaganda, and gave it away to all of our friends at Clark High School in Plano, Texas (click below to see each page). I had forgotten about it until a few years ago when somebody sent me copies of some of the pages they’d stashed away (which were already copies of copies of copies). The pages were washed out, gritty and hard to decipher, but I definitely remembered the whole thing. Then I forgot about it again. But recently, someone sent me crisp scans from some of the original “master” pages, which look even better than the original photocopies probably did (what is it about Xerox paper that doesn’t ever yellow, even after a quarter of a century?) Now, kick and scream as I click and drag you through my cut and paste past…
Check it out here.
Robb Kendrick fits in well not only because he is a sixth-generation Texan, raised in ranch country in the state’s panhandle, but also because of the unusual method of photography he favors, one patented and popularized at a time when the idea of the American cowboy was itself just being created.
He doesn’t need batteries or memory cards or even film for his pictures. Mostly he just needs time, patience and lots of elbow grease. And as he labors, moving methodically from beneath the hood of his wooden box camera to a portable field darkroom, bearing wet iron plates that he has painstakingly prepared, he thinks of himself not as simply making pictures but also as taking part in the world of the cowboys who are the subjects
Check it out here.
Scott Strazzante:
Well folks, I’ve decided to add one more blog to the world.
In the past, I have blogged as part of my job as staff photographer at the Chicago Tribune. I have blogged from the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece and from the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. I have sent dispatches from Super Bowl XLI in Miami and have kept a photo journal as a compliment to “The Season” photo column.
Now, I just feel that I need an outlet for work that at this point doesn’t have a home- my personal photos, outtakes, past unseen work and daily successes, near misses and total disasters.
I’m not sure how regularly I will post but i hope you get something out of it.
Quote: “One thing that Life and I agreed right from the start was that one war photographer was enough for my family; I was to be a photographer of peace.”
Check it out here.
This new quarterly publication is more than you might pay for your average magazine but looks to be worth every penny. A rumored 80 page photo essay by VII photographer Antonin Kratochvil isn’t a bad way to start.
Check it out here.
We landed in Yangon a week ago. We met up with many members of the press and listened to advice. Jaded advice. They were mostly all pulling up camp and heading back to their respective counties. The Junta had succeeded in keeping the press from telling the true story of the cyclone aftermath.
We, however, were ready for the challenge. I had time to dedicate to this story. I felt it was important. So we set off. After a few days we contracted a fixer. A young man named Jamie. He seemed very resourceful and was extremely eager to help.
Check it out here.
Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in New York after a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, first on the staff of Life magazine and then as a member of Magnum Photos, died Friday at his home in New York. He was 90.
Check it out here.
Accomplished Magnum photographer Cornell Capa passed away early on the morning of May 23rd at home in New York.
Check it out here.
With state TV cameras set up across a dusty field, he surveyed a row of battered and bullet-holed Hilux trucks that government forces had seized from the rebels. Bashir raised an ivory-tipped baton, and hundreds of security forces cheered, waving shoes, T-shirts and other clothes allegedly stripped off the doomed fighters.
Then he strolled past a 200-yard-long photo gallery, a grotesque display of burned and dismembered bodies, allegedly those of the rebels. Each image was underlined with the same caption in Arabic: “summary of failure.”
Check it out here.
Reporters Without Borders is outraged by the way a policeman on horseback struck photographer Víctor Salas several times with a metal riding crop while he was covering a protest yesterday in Valparaíso, a city to the west of Santiago. Salas, who works for the Spanish news agency EFE, has been hospitalised and risks using the use of his right eye as a result of the blows.
“Unfortunately this is not the first time that the Chilean security forces have used violence against the news media while maintaining order,” the press freedom organisation said. “We support the call by EFE’s Santiago bureau for the policeman who hit Salas to be identified and punished. How could a law enforcement officer have behaved with such lack of judgment? The investigation should seek the answer to this question.”
